The Transliteration and Transcription of Tibetan and Himalayan Languages Project Overview

Since the languages of the Tibetan and Himalayan region use non-Latin scripts, transliteration and transcription are important parts of the study of that area – the former representing a language’s orthography in a non-traditional script and the latter representing a language’s sounds phonetically in a non-traditional script. Even for the roman script, there are often many competing schemes for a given language. This is especially true for the Tibetan script, which has a number of competing roman script-based systems of transliteration and transcription. This site documents the various systems of orthographic transliteration and phonetic transcription for languages spoken and written in the region.

The US Library of Congress and the American Library Association offer standard transliteration schemes for major languages. While these schemes are often not used in scholarly or popular writings, at the very least they are important since they are used in the Library of Congress catalog records for text. They also offer a good starting point in looking into issues of transliteration for a given language.

It should be noted that for transliteration or transcription, there will be typically be a long history of competing schemes. It is often important to understand even outdated schemes, since they will be used in historical sources. In addition, even if there is a clear standard for transliteration or transcription, it may be essential that you understand and use multiple systems. For example, China uses systems of transliteration and transcription for Tibetan that no one in the world otherwise uses, but which must be accounted for given the extensive documentation produced in China; the US Library of Congress uses a different transliteration system for Tibetan also used by no one else in the world, but which must be understood to use LOC cataloging records for Tibetan texts; and the scholarly community uses yet another transliteration system for Tibetan. There is no clear transcription standard. Finally, it should be noted that keyboards are NOT the same as transliteration systems – instead, keyboards or input methods are often created for popular transliteration systems, even though it might be the case that a frequency type of keyboard would be superior.